From the Very Beginning ....to the Troubled Times to come Before the Deluge...

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Sunday, 8 December 2013

Welcome Back, Jesus

Welcome Back, Jesus

By Robert Scheer

Forget, for the moment, that he is the pope, and that Holy
Father Francis’ apostolic exhortation last week was addressed “to the bishops,
clergy, consecrated persons and the lay faithful.” Even if, like me, you don’t
fall into one of those categories and also take issue with the Catholic
Church’s teachings on a number of contested social issues, it is difficult to
deny the inherent wisdom and clarity of the pontiff’s critique of the modern
capitalist economy. No one else has put it as powerfully and succinctly.

It is an appraisal based not on “just pure Marxism coming
out of the mouth of the pope,” as Rush Limbaugh sneered, but rather the words
of Jesus telling the tale of the Good Samaritan found in Luke, not in “Das
Kapital.” As opposed to Karl Marx’s emphasis on the growing misery of a much
needed but exploited working class, Francis condemns today’s economy of
“exclusion” leaving the “other” as the roadkill of modern capitalism: “Today
everything comes under the laws of competition and the survival of the fittest,
where the powerful feed upon the powerless. As a consequence, masses of people
find themselves excluded and marginalized: without work, without possibilities,
without any means of escape.”

It is a message that applies to disrupted worldwide markets
in which massive unemployment is now common, as well as to the underemployed
and working poor who are the new “normal” even in still wealthy America. They
make up the bulk of those ejected from a once largely unionized industrial
workforce, who are now left to compete for low paying Wal-Mart style jobs that
require government handouts to avoid the extremes of poverty. They are the
victims of what the pope refers to as “trickle-down theories which assume that
economic growth, encouraged by a free market, will inevitably succeed in
bringing about greater justice and inclusiveness in the world.” It doesn’t, and
instead “a globalization of indifference has developed.”

That is an obvious truth, whether divinely inspired or not.
So too is Francis’ excoriation of “the new idolatry of money,” although here
one can find evidence in Scripture that this idolatry is not so new given the
description in Matthew 21:12 when Jesus “overthrew the tables of the
moneychangers” in the temple. But the pope is clearly right when he links our
recent economic crisis to the modern worship of the gods of finance capitalism:

“One cause of this
situation is found in our relationship with money, since we calmly accept its
dominion over ourselves and our societies. ... The worship of the ancient
golden calf has returned in a new and ruthless guise in the idolatry of money
and the dictatorship of an impersonal economy lacking a truly human purpose.
The worldwide crisis affecting finance and the economy lays bare their
imbalances and, above all, their lack of real concern for human beings. ...”

This is a pope who in his native Argentina bothered to
witness and tend to the needs of those who suffered most, and he comes to us
now as a singular voice to remind us of the Occupy movement, which mostly
secular liberal mayors in U.S. cities brutally silenced to suit the convenience
of the superrich who own our politics. The pontiff writes:

“While the earnings
of a minority are growing exponentially, so too is the gap separating the
majority from the prosperity enjoyed by those happy few. This imbalance is the
result of ideologies, which defend the absolute autonomy of the marketplace and
financial speculation. ... A new tyranny is thus born. ... The thirst for power
and possessions know no limits. In this system, which tends to devour
everything which stands in the way of increased profits, whatever is fragile,
like the environment, is defenseless before the interests of a deified market,
which become the only rule.”

The deification of the market rests on denying that ethical
considerations trump the goal of profit maximization. The market itself becomes
the higher power no matter the consequence for the exploited, the poor and the
defenseless. “Behind this attitude,” Francis writes, “lurks a rejection of
ethics and a rejection of God.” That is because ethics inevitably represents a
judgment that “makes money and power relative.”

Finally there is a stern warning by this leader of a church
with many followers in economically desperate areas that a status quo based on
the extremes of exploitation contains the seeds of its own destruction. “No to
the inequality that spawns violence,” the pope writes with words that apply to
the poverty ghettos of the most affluent nations, words that echo those used by
the Rev. Martin Luther King in organizing anti-poverty marches at the time of
his assassination.

“The poor and the
poorer peoples are accused of violence,” Francis warns, “yet without equal
opportunities the different forms of aggression and conflict will find a
fertile terrain for growth and eventually explode. When a society—whether
local, national, or global—is willing to leave a part of itself on the fringes,
no political programs or resources spent on law enforcement or surveillance
systems can indefinitely guarantee tranquility.” Amen.

about me

A new counter-culture is now spreading across the planet, a movement dedicated to protesting at the outlandish behaviour of the control freaks, with their surveillance, eavesdropping, secrecy and lies. Their greed and belligerent sabre rattling and their industries of war. The dream is to replace these sociopaths with Love!

I wish this blog to be a small part of this - We must be the change.

We will be set to task to rebuild our world and our planet from centuries of decimation and destruction brought on by the fallacy, the belief that we once tragically and collectively embraced thousands of years ago – the mistaken notion that we are separate from one another and everything else on the planet and in the universe. We will finally recognize that the truth is just the opposite – we are all one with everything on the planet and in the universe. We are spiritual beings, infinite consciousness simply having a human experience, and as soon we come to fully recognize and understand this, it will then finally be time for us to fly – to shine in all of our infinite, glorious possibility...